I am a faculty member jointly appointed in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. My research explores the interplay of language, cognition and computation with a focus on modeling lexical creativity. Natural language relies on a finite vocabulary to express an unbounded set of ideas. I am interested in how humans construct the lexicon to convey emerging meanings through time and across cultures. I take a computational approach to characterize the cognitive foundations of lexical creativity and the functional principles of the lexicon. I also develop methods for understanding diachronic processes including semantic change and moral change.
Sample publications
- Brochhagen, T., Boleda, G., Gualdoni, E., and Xu, Y. (2023) From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity. Science, 381(6656), 431-436.
- Ramezani, A. and Xu, Y. (2023) Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models. In ACL, 428-446, Toronto, Canada.
- Hahn, M. and Xu, Y. (2022) Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality. PNAS, 119(24), e2122604119.
- Prystawski, B., Grant, E., Nematzadeh, A., Lee, S.W.S., Stevenson, S., and Xu, Y. (2022) The emergence of gender associations in child language development. Cognitive Science, 46, e13146.
- Sun, Z., Zemel, R., and Xu, Y. (2021) A computational framework for slang generation. TACL, 9, 462-478.
- Mollica, F., Bacon, G., Zaslavsky, N., Xu, Y., Regier, T., and Kemp, C. (2021) The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication. PNAS, 118(49), e2025993118.
- Ferreira Pinto Jr., R. and Xu, Y. (2021) A computational theory of child overextension. Cognition, 206, 104472.
- Xu, Y., Liu, E., and Regier, T. (2020) Numeral systems across languages support efficient communication: From approximate numerosity to recursion. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 4, 57-70.
- Habibi, A.A., Kemp, C., and Xu, Y. (2020) Chaining and the growth of linguistic categories. Cognition, 202, 104323.
- Xu, Y., Duong, K., Malt, B.C., Jiang, S., and Srinivasan, M. (2020) Conceptual relations predict colexification across languages. Cognition, 201, 104280.
- Xie, J.Y., Ferreira Pinto Jr., R., Hirst, G., and Xu, Y. (2019) Text-based inference of moral sentiment change. In EMNLP-IJCNLP, 4654-4663, Hong Kong, China.
- Ramiro, C., Srinivasan, M., Malt, B.C., and Xu, Y. (2018) Algorithms in the historical emergence of word senses. PNAS, 115(10), 2323-2328.
- Kemp, C., Xu, Y., and Regier, T. (2018) Semantic typology and efficient communication. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4, 109-128.
- Xu, Y., Malt, B.C. and Srinivasan, M. (2017) Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium. Cognitive Psychology, 96, 41-53.
- Cibelli, E., Xu, Y., Austerweil, J.L., Griffiths, T.L., and Regier, T. (2016) The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and probabilistic inference: Evidence from the domain of color. PLOS ONE, 11(8), e0151138.
- Xu, Y., Regier, T. and Malt, B.C. (2016) Historical semantic chaining and efficient communication: The case of container names. Cognitive Science, 40(8), 2081-2094.
